“First of all, I have to be frank,” he says. “I depend on fossil fuels to make a living.” A charter boat captain on the Chesapeake Bay, Ide has fished his entire life. As such, he’s seen the decline in water quality and marine life in the Chesapeake firsthand.

“The water quality has been so bad these past two years, I had to move my boat because there weren’t any fish here,” he says. The dead zones get larger every year as algae blooms exacerbated by runoff from farm fertilizer, industrial livestock and poultry production eat up the oxygen marine life needs to survive.

Though the Dominion Cove Point LNG terminal won’t be dumping fertilizer, Ide says it will just be one more step in the degradation. “It’s not going to put me out of business,” he says, “but it's another brick in the wall. It's 49 more acres of heavy industrial build-out on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.”

Through seafood production and tourism, the Chesapeake Bay supports more than a trillion dollars of economic activity. The Calvert County shore in Maryland, where Dominion Energy plans to build the liquefaction facility, is home to wetlands and rare species of plants and animals, including migratory birds. Construction would require clearing forests and bringing in heavy construction materials on the Patuxent River.

The New York Times ran a must-read piece for anyone concerned about coal companies targeting American taxpayer-owned public lands, carting it by rail over to coastal ports throughout the Pacific Northwest, loading it onto barges and Panamax vessels, and then shipping it overseas to sell at a steep discount to Asian markets.

The article looks at the battle over the Northwest export terminals through the lens of the local American Indian tribes, who worry about the impacts on local fishing rights and the threats to sacred sites.

This Morrow Pacific Project is one of a handful of proposed export terminals that the industry hopes to build to help link coal from the strip mines of the Powder River Basin to overseas markets. As American demand for coal falls, companies (many foreign owned) are scrambling to access the growing Asian markets.

At issue with the export terminals is the process of review and approval, specifically with regard to the environmental impacts. As we wrote about the Morrow Pacific Project, the Army Corps has, at present, the final word in determining whether or not a terminal can be built. This is due primarily to the “dredge and fill” rules established in section 404 of the Clean Water Act, and the origin of Army Corps decisionmaking harkens all the way back to the Rivers and Harbons Appropriation Act of 1899.

Here’s the problem: in determining whether or not to approve a new facility such as a coal transfer terminal, the Army Corps is only compelled legally to look at the immediate environmental impacts at the site itself. These site-specific reviews wouldn’t take into account any broader of cumulative impacts, like, say, the impacts of coal dust along the route of the rail or barge traffic, nor the even broader and inevitable impacts of the coal’s combustion on mercury pollution and global climate disruption.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.